Taking a stand as a teacher

I took twenty-four 7th and 8th graders on a bus to downtown Denver last Wednesday, to the First Unitarian Church, where a man named Arturo Hernandez has claimed sanctuary from the U.S. government and its immigration enforcement arm, ICE.  A local immigration lawyer set up the meeting and accompanied us as a translator of Spanish and of law.  For over an hour, we sat in a circle with Arturo and listened to his story.  We learned why he decided to overstay his tourist visa fifteen years ago, a baby in his wife's arms.  We learned that he's worked to build a contracting business and a good reputation in the community, and that he's done it all because he wants his two teenage daughters to have the opportunities he never had.

He cried as he spoke to us.  Es duro, he said.  It's hard.  But he says he would do it all again if he could.

My students were studying immigration from a variety of perspectives last week -- we visited the Boulder Carnegie Archives to find out about immigration history, we heard a panel of three immigrants who came to Boulder legally (one from Nepal in 1960, one from Japan in 1962, one from Tibet in 1991), we met with the warden of the Aurora ICE Processing Center, and we visited Arturo.  My intention was mainly to get my students to start asking questions and to start thinking more deeply about immigration in this country.

Three of my students were so moved by Arturo's story that they wrote a letter to the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera about it.  Another small group of students composed an email to Representative Jared Polis; a group wrote a heartfelt letter to Arturo; and other groups made PSAs about what they'd learned.  It was an powerful, effective week of teaching and learning.

Or was it?  The vitriol in the online comments on the Daily Camera's site since yesterday's publication of my students' letter have stunned me.  "Horizons staff should be ashamed" and "This is why I don't send my kids to public school."  They criticize our learning as "one-sided" and "propaganda".  One commenter expressed horror that we communicated that breaking the law is okay and that an "illegal alien" deserves sympathy.

At lunch yesterday, those comments still fresh in my mind, I sat at my desk alone for a long moment.  All my students were outside at recess, playing basketball, giggling in small groups, munching from bags of pretzels while their friends performed tricks on the swings.  I listened to them for a moment, and let myself breathe.  My heart was hammering.  Where is the line between exposing students to real injustice and encouraging and inspiring them to take action. . .and objectively presenting both sides?  Had I inappropriately biased my students toward immigration reform?  Isn't my job as a social studies teacher to foster critical thinking and the search for as many perspectives as possible?

A student ducked her head in the door.  "Thanks for today," she said.  "I felt like social studies mattered today."

I smiled at her and she disappeared.  We had spent her class discussing the die-in protests in Boulder over the weekend, working to understand the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the Grand Jury decisions, and the reasons people are now protesting.  I didn't offer any opinions.  We read articles from The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Fox News, The New York Times, and Ebony.  I let them put together their own thinking about the cases.

At the end of the day, a student's parent stopped by my room to tell me she'd been trying to shield her son from the details of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, though she says she makes sure he "knows his 'isms'".  She seemed resigned when I told her what we'd done in class, sighing at her son's loss of innocence.  Again, I wondered:  what is my job here?  To shield kids from current reality?  The official Colorado state curriculum dictates that we teach about slavery, but we should give kids the impression that all race relations are now fixed?

I don't know.  I've never been good at separating my desire for justice in the world from my social studies teaching.  Howard Zinn is one of my heroes.  Today, we started a study of women's suffrage by looking through the lens of the current protests.  Everything's connected.  There are always more questions than answers.  The textbooks collecting dust beneath my desk only offer an edited version of a story, and not the whole truth, so help us, God.

I think about the people who don't get to choose to think about race or whether they grow up in a neighborhood where they feel safe, and I think about families who have come here seeking a better life (just like my German ancestors did), and I know that balanced objectivity is sometimes overrated in my profession.  I am on a side.  It's the human side.  I'm on the side that asks about the Sand Creek Massacre; the Lawrence, MA, strike; the force-feeding of suffragettes; the Jim Crow laws; nuclear programs; immigration law; Michael Brown.  I will present the primary sources that surround each event, and again and again I will ask my students:  What is just?  What would you have thought/felt in the same situation?

A few years ago, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't have an opinion about gay marriage.  When my students asked, I responded that it was a human rights issue, and that it is wrong to deny any adult the right to marry a person he/she loves.  I refused to speak objectively about it -- about my right as a lesbian -- any longer.

In the past two weeks, as I've led my students into an exploration of the immigration question and of current events, I've again taken a stance on the human side. It's not balanced.  Neither is our world.